How to Reduce Project Development Costs

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Project development, especially for a digital product, is costly. Expenses can add up unexpectedly. However, if you are good at planning, remain aware of possible pitfalls, and take the right steps, you can keep your costs down.

Why Is Project Development So Expensive?

There could be several reasons why your project is costing so much, including:

You might have a large project team
The process of project development includes several stages

The multiple stages of project development should properly include:

Briefing both team and management
Pre-project analytics
Design of the project itself
Interface design
Mobile development
Backend development
Technical support
Promotion

This Guide Can Help to Reduce the Cost of Project Development

From one to three highly paid specialists are involved in project development at each stage, and you also need to account for the cost of payroll for your company’s other employees. Normally, the duration of project development runs around four to six months.

We offer you this guide and ten tips for reducing the costs for development of your project:

1. Know Your Target Audience

If you know your customer and market, you know exactly what product you need to create. The better you conduct this initial phase, the more likely it will be that you will capitalize on your software development effort.

2. Set Precise Requirements

Delivering the proper requirements will allow you to estimate software development costs accurately and select the best approaches to implement your solution. Also, clear project requirements will make it easier for you to communicate with your project development team. Naturally, the best approach is to build your application with a dedicated development team. Clarity throughout the process will result in less confusion and will minimize the possibility of misunderstandings and errors.

3. Consider a Project Development Team in Another Locale

Since project development can easily take place remotely, consider working with a team in another locale.

Different countries have different salaries. For example, the average cost of software project development in Eastern Europe is about $15 to $20 per hour. Meanwhile, working with high-quality programmers in America can cost from $150 to $2,000?? per hour. This represents a tenfold difference between price, while still being able to have quality work.

4. Adopt an Agile Approach

An Agile approach will reduce your costs for project development. Following this methodology, your project is transparent, remains flexible, and is always ready for change.

5. Implement DevOps

DevOps is another way to optimize your application development costs. A key DevOps approach is that this practice and its culture enable team members to interact easily with each other as well as with the client.

6. Avoid Agreeing to a Fixed Price and Fixed Scope

There are three types of contracts in software project development:

Fixed-price contract
Time-and-materials (T&M) contract
Dedicated development team contract

It can be a mistake to agree upfront to a contract with a fixed price and scope. With such a price model, developers will try not to exceed the budget. However, this generally doesn’t work well for obtaining a final version with high quality. Moreover, with this approach it’s hard to adapt and make changes, and this is key in project development.

This is especially true with an Agile approach. A contract for a fixed price and scope is only suitable for simple and predictable projects. However, if your project doesn’t seem this simple, you need to work with an outfit such as T&M software development.

7. Adopt a Lean Approach

The Lean approach is a versatile methodology that works with project development regardless of industry. Flexibility is a crucial tenet of Agile. Moreover, intelligence and a lean approach, as the name implies, are critical tenets of Lean. Together, these two methodologies offer excellent opportunities for change and adaptation, provided that each idea is thoroughly tested before making the final decision on its implementation.

8. Launch Your Product with Essential-Only Features

MVP, or “minimum viable product,” is one of the Lean methodology’s key milestones, as it allows you to show your product in its early stages to your target audience. They can then test it in a real environment and send you feedback. Accordingly, you then use these insights for further development and improvement. The essence of such a strategy is to gain a real understanding of the market situation and assess the prospects of launching a successful application in real time with minimal investment.

9. Consider a Semi-Custom Alternative

Custom software development is costly, since you need to build everything from scratch. You can use this approach if your project is complicated, but there is also an alternative that will allow you to reduce costs.

This approach, namely, is a semi-personalized approach. This strategy can be relevant if you want to decrease your project development cost while still creating a unique product. However, you still need a strong team of developers. This is because your solution will be partly built using the existing functions of other applications in the form of an application programming interface (API).

10. Prioritize Usability over Visual Design

It is extremely important to give your customers a great design that also gives them easy usability. All the same, there is no way to separate visual design from usability, because it provides a first visual impression that prompts users to continue exploring a product, close a web, page, or uninstall an app.

What’s the Bottom Line When It Comes to Project Development?

The project development process is costly. However, if you follow our advice, you can cut costs without sacrificing the quality of the final product. First, though, you need to be sure you’re working with a talented and committed team that wants to take on your project and provide you with your desired result.